RED Alert

An evening with Harman RED

Gimmicky films. You know I love ‘em. With the increasing fear of dwindling emulsion types entering the world becoming more real every day, I’ll take all of the different films I can get. I’ll shoot anything—new film, old film, expired film, whacky film. Film is like food in that I think you need to try everything once to decide if you’re going to want to eat it again.

So this week, I’m taking a look at Harman’s RED, a redscale film that renders the world in hellish, dystopian coloration unlike any other film I’ve used before. Have you ever seen the 1990 film Hardware, because that’s what this film reminds me of. Did I like what I got? Let’s take a look at some of the images I pulled from the Paterson tank.

First off, my images are limited by my own technique, which involved home development with Cinestill’s Cs-41 kit and a Plustek 8200i scanner, as well as my skills with Lightroom. And my skills as a photographer, but that’s another story entirely. Truthfully, my greatest enemy when shooting was my own shaky hands because I believe I rated the film at 125 and shot everything at night. What else is new? Some of my images were straight up unusable blobs, but I also got some gems, which I’ll count as a win.

The first thing I noticed when I looked at my images was that I had the most success when aiming for highlights, whites and bright areas. Blacks and shadows seem to fall into the void of some dark abyss where light can’t reach. Fitting. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This gives the images a crunchy, contrasty quality. When the exposure is proper and the light falls nicely onto subjects the film provides a very interesting effect.

Since this was the first time I’d used the film, I decided to shoot some familiar locations around Tokyo where I knew I could compare the film to others I’d shot. This helped me establish a bit of a baseline to understand what it does and doesn’t do.

Despite rating the film so low, I still found it a bit grainy, but in the highlight areas rather than the shadows. Proper exposure tends to lean more yellow and orange than red, which is another cool effect. I amplified the reds in post a bit.

Looking at my results, despite the film’s nature as a color negative, it actually seems to look like it may be preferred to be treated like a black and white film. This is due to the very limited range of actual color there is. There’s a gradient of yellow, orange and red…and black, at least as far as my eyes can see. That’s a very non-scientific observation, but one I made nonetheless.

What I found most interesting was that I didn’t feel like I needed, or even wanted, to edit these images very much. I don’t mean that they are perfect the way they are, but more so that I just didn’t want to modify their character much other than doing some minor adjustments. The film does what the film does, so in the words of the great Sir Paul McCartney, why not let it be?

One action I took was to push my tint toward magenta (green in the reversal) to give it less of a yellow quality and lean more red. I went very easy on my sliders because any adjustment too far in any direction and my images appeared to fall apart quickly. I also did the standard cropping to get rid of my edges.

Ultimately I found it to be a bit like Lomo’s Turqoise or Purple emulsions. If you know what you’re intending to do when you use it, you may like your results. However, these speciality films tend to be fickle, so it doesn’t hurt to do a little research before you try them. Or, you know, do what I do and just load it up and get rocking.

Will I use it again? The answer is an emphatic yes, because I’d like to try it in the day, and also because I’d like to keep fooling around with it at night. I will make sure to feed this film plenty of light, because it seems to do best (duh) when provided with it. I hear you already: film likes light, Clarke. Yeah, I’m aware, but this film is madly in love with it. I would consider overexposing by one stop at night when trying it next.

Have you shot Harman RED? If so, what you like, or dislike, about it?